Workflow

It’s always interesting to find out how people set up their coding environment. To be honest I don’t think I’ll ever get the perfect setup but what I currently have does a pretty good job.

Tweaking your Sublime Text settings is relatively easy but can be a little daunting if you are fan of a GUI. Within Sublime all settings are handle by a simple JSON file. They can be found either from under the Sublime Text menu (Sublime Text 2 -> Preferences -> Settings – User) or by the shortcut (Command + .).

A few months ago, I started to research build processes to help improve the pattern we currently follow at work. During my research I somehow ended up configuring Grunt and discovered the true awesomeness it has to offer. Unfortunately, so far I haven’t managed to integrate it into our workflow, but for my after-hours development, it has become an integral part of the way things roll.

During a discussion a few weeks ago with an amazing front-end developer I was blown away that they hadn’t even given CSS preprocessing a go. I was bamboozled.

Learning something new, be it Sass, Less, YUI, Grunt, etc can always be a little daunting but making the time to ‘try’ is an important part of developing for the web.

If you get overwhelmed with all these new fandangle ‘things’ people are talking about, be mindful that you don’t necessarily have to adopt them. Having a basic understanding and awareness of what they do is all you really need to know. If the ‘thing’ really fits into your development workflow, then it’s a win. Dedicating more time to really learn and adopt it should be a no brainer. If it doesn’t, then at least you have the peace of mind that you’re not doing things in a inefficient manner.

During the last six months I have been meaning to play around with one of the many static site generators to see what all the hype is about. After a bit of research I decided to head down the Jekyll path. A fair few people tend to be using Octopress and Kirby but my main reason for choosing Jekyll was this little ‘Static Site Generators‘ gist put together by Dave Rupert. In my eyes, the fact that Jekyll has the biggest community behind it gives it the winning edge, especially for when help is needed.

Turns out, Jekyll is rad! It’s a simple, blog aware, static site generator built in Ruby. It takes a template directory, runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website.

The NodeJS implementation of Knyle Style Sheets (KSS) developed by Hugh Kennedy is super handy. With one simple command after you have set it up you can generate a living style guide. Having to always update your style guide is generally a chore. This saves the day.